This single change increases employee retention, creates job joy & produces better work

When I started my career in an agency, I was as excited as I was intimidated. I was working with incredible talent, but the company was a very fragmented environment.

For example, in two years of working there, I was only in two client meetings. Instead of me getting direct feedback and having a chance to dialogue, my boss would go to the meetings, and she’d relay the agenda, how the client felt about my work, and most notably for today’s topic—she’d tell me what we were going to do.

So, what was my role here?

I was the hit man, carrying out the dirty work.

Less cryptically, I was the copywriter who took her campaign ideas and executed them. I wrote the captions, scheduled the approved content, interacted with follower engagement, and pulled numbers to create performance reports (a far more laborious task back then—it’s automated now). Heck, I even did some design and took the photos.

I was a junior, so it was my place and I was happy to do it—for a while. I had some autonomy on day-to-day content, but campaigns? No, never. 

It was nearly two months on the job before I was even allowed to start contributing to content. After nine months of handholding, I was ready to do more. I wanted opportunities to be creative. We finally landed a new, small client, and I pounced. This was my chance to break out. I pitched some ideas, went to a client meeting, and felt involved—up until my boss decided to keep it. We were going to run our normal process.

I became disengaged at that point. I was “quiet quitting,” as the kids say.

I started to loathe working under this boss, but having just pivoted into advertising from journalism, I felt trapped. I was eventually moved into a PR role, which meant a new boss. I liked the new job and boss, but it didn’t matter—the agency fired me after finding out about my side hustle.

I was pissed. 

Partially because I had so dreamed about quitting and going out on my terms. It had become a lunchtime fantasy of mine. Instead, one day I got the two finger “come here” from the CEO, and minutes later I’m packing up my cacti collection.

(Note: Never take more junk to an office than you can pack out in one trip)

A few weeks later, I put it behind me when I became the lone copywriter at another agency.

I was immediately happier than I had ever been at my first job, and there was a very clear reason. 

A shift in mindset

My new boss was Kate, who is still the best boss I’ve ever had. In the first week, she asked if I had ever done task after task, and nearly each time I said “no.” She’d say something like, “OK, well that’s fine. Here are some similar projects we’ve done. Take a look, and then get familiar with this brand. It’s our new client and you’re going to run with it.”

For no reason at all, Kate trusted me. I mean, I was the kid who had just gotten fired, but she still took me in, showed me around and even tossed me the keys to the family car.

The freedom to lead creative almost felt like a trick, as if someone was waiting on me to screw it up so they could shout and say, “See! You can’t lead a project! You did deserve to be canned! You’re not a copywriter!”

It never happened, and let’s be clear—I did screw it up. A lot.

But I learned exponentially more when I was allowed to try and fail. 

We lost clients along the way, and I mean Kate and I were flat out fired at times. Over a few years though, our small team started cranking out really great work. We would eventually 4X our annual revenue. I started studying the work of great copywriters, digesting dozens of books in a single year. This was probably at least partially compensating for some kind of PTSD handed to me from my old boss, who about once a week reminded me she had two degrees and was very smart.

In time, Kate and her boss promoted me to Creative Director.

I had some failures immediately, but racked up dozens of quick-hit lessons along the way:

• You can't lend a hand when you rule with a closed iron fist

• Great ideas don't strike like lightning, they rises like a flood

• There is no "I" in team, but there is an "I" in fail—learn to enunciate it

• Say "we" when the team wins, and "I" when you lose. Protecting your team from politics keeps them focused and happy, and it yields compounding results.

• Input is worth mere fractions of output.

• Build a system that encourages participation from the team vs. building a team that participates in executing your ideas.

• Find ways to stretch your team into decision making and leadership decisions. It will help you identify your leaders, and help them realize how hard your job is. Empathy is key to culture.

By the time I left the agency, we had a strong team, clawed our way into the top billings in the region, won our biggest client deal ever, and we won our first awards (I protested even signing up for the awards—advertising awards are dumb). Had I not founded my own company, I wouldn’t have left. I loved that team.

Our team at OOHology before I left. I’m proud to say Arica (top left) and Donovan, to my immediate left, came with me to GoWild. We are all on our third company together. Everyone on this team has gone on to do truly great work, and I’m proud of them.

The differences in my experience at these two agencies are astoundingly different. In my early years at each, I was doing the exact same work—copywriting.

One was under a watchful eye, and another was with total freedom. 

At the first agency, ideas flowed top down. I was merely there to execute. At my second agency, we all brainstormed over beers, burgers, pizzas, cigars, or even while racing around the office in those cliché $750 Herman Miller chairs—very agency of us.

At one job I felt trapped.

At another, I was challenged. 

Leaders, whether they’re juniors or seniors, A+ talent does not want to execute your ideas. And you don’t want it either. By empowering your team to contribute to solutions, you are challenging them, which is what it takes for them to grow.

The hammer drops—here is the tip

I know this has been a bit of story time, but it’s all framing up into this one tip.

Flipping your ideation from “top down” to “bottom up” will completely flip your culture around. I mean culture, too. It will change how your team interacts in all facets of the company because it emphasizes the value in being curious.

Who doesn’t want to build a team who always says, “Hmm, I wonder why that is?” Curious team members don’t gloss over mistakes or ship bad products, because their brain can’t leave the problem unsolved. Leaders who try to solve all of their team’s problems are shorting performance by betting on control.

Bottom up cultures will have tremendous impacts on your team. You will:

• Increase your team retention• Empower your team to act without permission• Increase your team's job joy / happiness• Recruit A players• Build better products

All of that simply because you stopped handing out solutions to be implemented, and started leaning on your team for solutions.

It will also have an impact on you as a leader. When you realize how much time you’ve spent orchestrating solutions for your team to execute, the weight off your shoulders will be immense. Managers who think their job is to hand out solutions grow tired, burn out and their skills get dull without contrasting opinions to sharpen them. Instead of you ideating in a vacuum, focus on being a coach, building a playbook that sets the team up for success, and step back to watch the wins come in.

And finally? When word gets out your team is empowered to be curious and allowed to solve problems, you’re going to start recruit some serious talent.

There is so much more to culture. Redesigning yours can’t be done with a single newsletter post, but it can improve with these three tips.

How to flip your team from top down to bottom up

• Identify your team’s natural leaders and ask them for help.

Find a task you’d normally take on, and ask a leader-to-be to help with the effort. Tell them they can brainstorm a solution with teammates, but do not give them ideas. Give a clear time frame on when they can pitch solutions to you.

• Do not come to the meeting with your own solution.

This is not about showcasing how smart you are, it’s about helping the team learn to work through challenges. Hear them out, ask questions instead of making statements, and guide them to answers with nudges. Your goal is to get a solution while speaking as little as possible.

• Take the solution, even if you could do better.

You won’t always be happy with the outcome, but embrace it. Many times I got creative work that I wouldn’t have done myself, but you know what? The client loved it. You can’t build confidence if you never give an idea the chance to work.

Extra credit: I have led with this process for years, but when I read Jocko Willink and Leif Babin’s “Extreme Ownership” I found myself practically shouting “YES!” to myself. This book does a great job of also highlighting this cultural aspect, as well as many others. It’s a great read.